The recent coronavirus pandemic has caused massive disruption across almost all sectors. The sectors that remain the most affected by the pandemic are aviation, realty, finance, and automobiles.
One of the sectors that have also been majorly impacted by coronavirus is the insurance sector. While the insurance sector was already facing challenges of competitive premiums and enhanced coverage plans along with a spike in the number of insurance claims and increased severity of the claims, coronavirus has added to the list. One of the areas most affected in the insurance industry is insurance policy checking services. While the overall insurance market is affected, the insurance sectors that remain the most impacted by the pandemic include motor/ vehicle insurance, health insurance, and life insurance.
Although coronavirus has been profitable for vehicle insurance policies in the short-term, the long-term effects of the pandemic can be detrimental. Short-term profits are seen because there has been a reduction in the number of vehicles plying on the roads due to the pandemic. Less vehicle plying means fewer instances of accidents and other damages to the vehicles. Long-term damage caused by this pandemic to vehicle insurance policies is because lesser people are buying new vehicles during the pandemic. Most motor insurance companies run on premiums given during the purchase of new vehicles. Reduction in the purchase of vehicles would mean lesser earning and potential losses.
Read Also 8 Major Benefits of Outsourcing Insurance Policy Checking Services
Health insurance is another insurance that has been affected by coronavirus. Regulatory bodies have instructed insurance companies to accept COVID-19 claims under active insurance policies. Due to the increasing coronavirus cases in the country, this is bound to put a burden on insurance companies. The coronavirus pandemic has also led to an increase in the concerns regarding health and safety. On the other hand, the limited cash flow during the pandemic has forced the insured to be gravely concerned about a potential hike in expenses.
Usually, in the face of crises like this, people are in a hurry to increase their cover. But due to a decrease in the income and the additional costs associated with medical tests, a decrease is expected in the number of term policies being purchased. This has forced insurers all over the world to bring out policies that fit into this bracket of lowered income. As a result, insurance policy checking and administration services is poised to become more critical in the days to come.
What is Insurance Policy Checking and Administration Services?
Policy checking and administration services are end-to-end evaluation processes of insurance products that are issued to a customer. It is carried out by most of the insurance carriers. Insurance companies often have thousands of new applications and the renewal and maintenance of the applications require a streamlined process to follow up with agents and clients.
Insurance policy checking may include checking the worker’s compensation policies, or business owner’s policies. Sometimes, it may entail policy checking for life insurance policies too. Identification of inaccuracies and follow-up on collecting all the missing data will not only save time but also minimize costs.
Importance of Insurance Policy Checking Services:
Business continues to grow, right from the time an insurance company gets a new customer. Over time, their policies grow and there are critical tasks and verification processes involved. The policy checking process thus gains prominence. Carried out by a dedicated team of insurance professionals, the major advantages of the process include:
- Reduced handling times
- Lower training costs
- Quick turn-around time
- Precise and quick insurance policy checking services.
Organized verification is the crux of policy checking service. The policy documents are reviewed to maintain higher accuracy levels. The service provider will ensure that the policy is in tune with the guidelines of the proposal. If the customer is looking at renewing a policy, the policy checking, and administration services team ensures that the new policy matches with the previous term policies.
A policy administration system is ideal to implement a number of core processes like issuing new policies and renewal of existing policies. The process is carried out by analysing policy documents with precision and comprehending the differences in coverages to ensure if it is in tune with the industry standards.
Policy checking services helps businesses and individual policy holders. It is integral to maintain a policy checking services as there are complex coverages, enhanced exposures and higher risks involved. A versatile system that records and maintains all policies that an insurance company has documented is important for your business. A complete and robust solution can augment your insurance claims and reimbursements effectively.
Challenges in Policy Checking During Covid-19
There are many challenges that the insurance companies are facing and have successfully overcome during this coronavirus pandemic. Some of them are as follows:
- Risk of outsourcing
Many US insurance companies who outsourced their back end and other administrative processes to countries like China, India, Eastern European countries, etc. suffered due to sudden lockdown announced by the government. The workers could not continue working remotely due to lack of technical resources, and also, if they were able to work, other challenges relating to the protection of data and other security issues were constricting work.
- Risk of fraud
Fraudulent risk claims have always been a huge challenge to insurance companies all over the world. But, this problem has surged to new heights during this coronavirus outbreak. These frauds include, but are not limited to, customer claims. Remote working has raised many security concerns as the rate of hacking attempts are increasing that could potentially breach security and obtain information on insured financial status, mess with the servers, and get other information about the customers.
- Keeping the shared network functioning
With the majority of the insurance offices closed due to government restrictions, policyholders are now contacting their brokers for information on their policy and other cover related questions. More often than not, brokers lack the adequate technical resources needed to answer claim-related questions like the rate of their cover in changing market conditions, etc. Brokers and insurers are also facing trouble with the immediate renewal of their insurance due to discrepancies in-network and processes.
- Ensure proper team collaboration
Ensuring that the members of a team can work together efficiently is a challenge today as most companies have switched to remote working. Proper functioning between the team members is important to make the process of insurance policy checking easier and quicker. However, due to remote working this is quite difficult.
- Quality check for remote working
Establishing expectations and the quality of work expected from employees, especially when working remotely at different times is difficult. Working remotely has caused a blur between work hours and off-hours. While ensuring that top-quality work is delivered by the employees is quite uncomplicated when working at the same office, but not quite the same during these unprecedented times.
Overcoming the Insurance Policy Checking Challenges USA
In such times, it becomes very important to tackle policy checking challenges and respond to the increase in demand of policies designed around the new potential losses that could occur during the volatile nature of this pandemic, and its effect on the insureds.
Checking of policy is as important as buying the policy, as the policyholder will not be eligible for any claim if the policy is wrongly worded. Therefore, even during this dark time, companies need to have an effective and reliant policy checking process in place.
Companies with the best, most hassle-free policy checking services have also suffered in the current times. However, with a few changes in the processes, they can always ban can help them easily process renewals, while making the process hassle-free for insureds as well.
Here are some policy checking steps that companies can take to overcome challenges associated with an insurance policy checking:
- Cloud-based services and automation
Full automation of all services and end-to-end encryption of all services is the best way to tackle the problem of interrupted or paused services like that of policy checking. The safe cloud-based system allows the employee and the broker to have access to all the required information from anywhere, making the policy checking much easier. Therefore, companies can hire cloud-based service providers to assist their functioning and smoothen their processes.
- Using available resources to improve productivity
It is not surprising to know that companies who already had a well-oiled digital administrative and claims processing worked slower but faced lesser issues than those who were slow to digitise and still relied on the traditional, old ways of functioning. With more and more people getting laid off and an increase in the number of customer queries, many companies are looking to re-allocate their queries to a third party.
- Business continuity plans
While the current state of COVID crisis around the world seems bad, there is a possibility that the situation might degenerate more than it already has. Having a robust business continuity plan in place that encourages two-way information sharing and communication is necessary. It is an ideal way to deal with challenges like policy checking, in times where people cannot approach offices to get the aid that they need and questions they have for policy matters.
- Transparency and trust
With the amount of risk that the insured is willing to take in these testing times being less, more transparency from the insurer’s side would make the insured feel safe and place their trust in the insurance company. Policyholders are more likely to be forthcoming with renewal if the insurance company provides a correct and detailed description of the risks involved and additional details about the areas covered under the insurance policy.
- Broaden the horizon of the cover
Coronavirus has brought with it a new horizon of possible risk factors that many insureds are looking to seek covers for. Some of these are general commercial liability to protect themselves in case someone gets infected in their place of business. Others are property insurance with cover for business interruption, director’s, and officer’s liability insurance to protect them from lawsuits that could potentially come their way through statements that could potentially affect their stock price, or for companies who file for bankruptcy due to decrease in business because of coronavirus.
Other examples of additional covers that the companies can give are worker’s compensation, cyber insurance for protection against the potential risk of hackers, and cyber frauds.
- Using analytic services
With limited resources to keep the business going, insurance companies have heightened their reliance on data analytics and business intelligence. A tool that can provide them with business intelligence services during this pandemic is Microsoft Power BI. Power BI provides business intelligence services to non-tech business users with tools for gathering, analysing, visualising, and sharing data in the form of interactive visualisations that can be shared across various forums and dashboards.
Data from Excel spreadsheets and other cloud-based systems can be easily converted into logical and engaging vision boards. Power BI has been beneficial for businesses in numerous ways as it requires very limited technical skills, making it very easy to use for non-technical business owners.
A unified 360-degree view of policy checking process can help you overcome most of the associated challenges in the pandemic. You need to partner with someone whose understanding of the insurance policy checking process is strong and deep.
With guidelines and policies constantly changing due to COVID-19, your partner must ensure that all your data is uploaded, keeping in mind new regulatory requirements. With businesses already struggling in this time of crisis, you need to outsource insurance policy checking service to get maximum benefit out of it.
Who We are and Why We Are an Authority?
Insurance Back Office Pro has the technical expertise and the tools that adapt to today’s constantly changing environment. They are at your service 24/7 to provide you with assistance whenever you need it. Insurance Back office Pro provides high-quality insurance policy checking services to insurance providers. They consider that the only way to effectively avert a crisis such as COVID-19 is through intelligent decision making backed by insightful data. They do all this to ensure that insurance businesses continue to function as normally as they can even during crisis situations like this.
